Stress and Your Heart

Of all the components of a healthy lifestyle, I’ve always sort of pooh-poohed the role of stress in my own life. Stress management was for other people, those Type-A’s, the chronically angry, or women without a lot of outlets (I’m picturing being home with your kids and realizing that you know every Barney song, but don’t know what day of the week it is).

But over the last year or so, I’ve started to give more credence to the consequences of not managing “stress.” Remember this poster? “Stress is when your mind overrides your body’s basic desire to choke the living crap out of some butthead who desperately needs it”.

A new British study reports that “Employees with chronic work stress were more than twice as likely to have the syndrome [Metabolic Syndrome] than those without work stress,” the researchers write in BMJ Online First.